With 'A Catered Affair,' Porchlight looks to a new era

In this season of artistic change at several Chicago theaters, the Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago is next up at bat.

Under its former artistic director, L. Walter Stearns (who now runs the Mercury Theater on Southport Avenue), Porchlight staged simplified, off-Loop versions of mostly familiar Broadway titles, such as "Into the Woods" and "The King and I," and did so in mostly traditional ways. Stearns is gone now, and managing director Jon Heuring is leaving in April. The new artistic director, Michael Weber, says he wants to change all that and reconceive Porchlight as the home of "Chicago-style musicals," by which Weber means characterized by emotional honesty, weighty characters and a measure of under-the-tracks grit.

The first show is "A Catered Affair," which opens on Tuesday under the direction of Nick Bowling and musical direction of Doug Peck. It would seem to fit the bill. This musical, set among working-class folks in the Bronx in 1953 and concerned with preparations for a wedding that nobody can really afford, is based on the Richard Brooks movie "The Catered Affair," penned by Gore Vidal, and an original teleplay written by Paddy Chayefsky ("Network"). The music is by John Bucchino and the book is by no less than Harvey Fierstein.

But that pedigree did not stop director John Doyle's New York production from lasting barely more than three months. I saw this show at the Walter Kerr Theatre in the spring of 2008, and it was, in its way, beautiful and, on occasion, very moving. There was a memorable portrait of what it was like to be a gay man in the America of the 1950s. And I was very taken with the central question of the piece: Is it always stupid for a struggling family to spend a heap of money to feed a group of strangers, or is a wedding the one moment when you have to sacrifice your all to do it up right? We're confronted with some version of that question on many occasions in our lives. Although artful, Doyle's production was not exactly a cheering night at the theater. It was as if a gray malaise had descended on the Walter Kerr.

"Everyone is too terminally depressed to cry," I wrote at the time. Well, there's a qualification for Chicago-style, in some minds, anyway. Depressing can work in this town. Especially if it's well sung.

Fierstein, who was giving interviews the other day in support of the show — this is the first Chicago production of "A Catered Affair" — said the issue on Broadway was, in the first place, "horrifying reviews" (horrifying being a different word from horrid), and, in the second place, economic realities.

"We sold like a drama, and there's a reason that dramas don't run through the summer," Fierstein said.

Looking back, Fierstein also allowed that maybe those darker notes in the story were hit a bit too strongly.

"We might have been more dire than we needed to be," Fierstein said with a laugh, saying that if he could do it all again, he would have wanted the show to reflect more of the inherent joy of any wedding, however difficult the circumstances.

"It's interesting how a production can take on a life of its own and go in one direction." Fierstein said. "I've seen a couple of others that don't come off nearly as dark, in the long run."

We'll have to see what happens at Porchlight.

Clearly, Fierstein is invested in the character of the uncle, a single man who lives on his relative's couch and is an observer of what goes on around him.

"I really saw my way into the story through the idea of the uncle," Fierstein said. "Here was a man who doesn't have a life of his own, doesn't have his own family. He could easily have been a gay person. We need each other. We have need of family groups."

Fierstein described "A Catered Affair" as "a very noble piece," which feels like a very apt description of its New York production. On Tuesday, this challenging work will kick off a new Chicago-style era for a venerable Chicago company that says it wants to embrace the serious, the difficult and the true.